His Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew presided over the Patriarchal Divine Liturgy today, May 19, 2024, on Myrrh-bearing Sunday, which was performed in the Valukli Monastery, with the participation of the bishops of the Ecumenical See and the Holy Churches of Bulgaria and Ukraine.
This is reported by the official website of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.
In his address after the Divine Liturgy, Patriarch Bartholomew mentioned the Myrrh-bearers, who were the first to hear the good news about the Resurrection of the Lord, and expressed his joy over the participation in today’s Divine Liturgy of bishops from the two subsidiary Churches of Bulgaria and Ukraine.
“The news of the Resurrection sounds in today’s holiday ‘beyond the walls’. This is Christ’s last commandment to his disciples: Go out into the world, beyond the walls of the cities, and preach the Resurrection ‘everywhere’, having the Lord himself as a partner, who will testify to this word ‘with the signs that will follow’”.
“A sign of the Lord’s eternal presence among us is the gathering with the high-priest brothers from the two beloved daughters of the Church of Constantinople, namely from the Autocephalous Churches of Bulgaria and Ukraine. Your presence, venerable brothers, in the courtyard of the common Mother Church is for us an occasion for consecration, because the labors of this Church, which has always been empty and deprived of all its resources for the well-being of its children, have not been fruitless. At the same time, we are confident that for you, too, the pilgrimage to the Reigning and Great Church is a spiritual return to the font that nourished and revived your peoples and became a decisive and beneficial turning point in their history and culture.”
Concluding his speech, the patriarch thanked the governor of the monastery.
